Contributing to Neo4j

Want to help others?

There are a number of great resources the Neo4j community uses to get quick help from graph database experts. Don’t hesitate to ask when you’re stuck and looking for help. Also, if you’re familiar with a particular topic area, please jump in and lend a hand for your fellow graphistas.

The primary home for Neo4j community discussion is our Neo4j Forum.

We also have some other places the community asks questions.

If you have technical questions, we would love to help you find the answers to them! Please help us help you by following the guidelines below.

Write a title that summarizes the specific problem
The title may be the first and the last thing that potential viewers see of your post. Make it count. Make it describe the problem, not your current state of mind. ALL CAPS and lots of question and exclamation marks are an indication that you wear your underwear on your head ??? not that you have an urgent problem !!!

Choose the correct "category" and add the relevant "tags"
Both of these serve to narrow down the problem area. A database creation error on the "Neo4j Desktop" is quite possible, it is almost impossible if installed with a Yum package. For installation questions specifying the OS is definitely useful. And so on.

Explain First
What do you want to accomplish? What is the problem? What have you tried (you have tried something, right…​right?)? Can you reproduce the situation? Which steps need to be followed to get there?

Code Second
For some weird reason, Verdana 12pt does horrible things to code. There are a ton of ways to add readable code in your posts, the easiest is to select it and use the </> preformatted text icon. Reading hundreds of lines of code and Cypher-queries is the favorite hobby of most of the visitors of the forum. Just in case it is one of the others that is trying to help you, provide the code that demonstrates the issue and no more.

Proofread
Are you ready to press "Create"? Take a deep breath. Exhale. Go once more over what you’ve just written. Does it look like the kind of question you could answer?

I’m not sure my English is good enough…​can I get help?
Just do the best you can! While technical questions should be in English, there are Local Groups on the forum. Not only are those good for finding out about local activities, but there might be somebody else there that knows (for example) South-West England English and can help you translate it into six o’clock news English!

Be Patient - Be Friendly - Be Polite - Help someone else in turn
Somebody is going to spend some of the single most valuable resources for a human on your question. Time. Giving an indication that you understand the value of that is the least you can do.

No matter where you live in the world, there are plenty of ways to share your love of graphs and help others understand the importance of relationships.

With thousands of technology and business conferences occuring every year around the world, you can present to your peers and become a recognized expert in your field. Neo4j, via the Neo4j Speaker Program, can also help and reimburse travel expenses for community members speaking at many of the top conferences.

There are also hundreds of face-to-face Neo4j meetup groups in communities around the world. Many of these meetup groups regularly look for speakers to share their stories.

The Neo4j Online Meetup is a way for you to meet the global community online and share your story.

We select talks for the Online Meetup and stories for our Developer Newsletter from Neo4j Community Forum. To submit your story, post it in the Projects & Collaboration (if including a link to github or website) or Community Content & Blogs (if linking to a blog post, slideshow, video, or article) categories.

The Neo4j project is an open source effort to bring fast, complex data storage and processing to life. Every form of help is highly appreciated by the community. Note that you can contribute to Neo4j also by providing documentation or giving feedback on the current documentation. Basically, in all the places where you can get help, there is also room for contributions.

We are happy users of the following tools that we use daily to develop Neo4j.

Neo4j is supported by a rich ecosystem of libraries, tools, drivers and guides provided by partners, users and community contributors. We want to give an overview about what is available and link to the original sources. We try to focus on the freely available solutions here and provide links to commercial options where appropriate.

Read more about it in our Integrations section.